


Uncrossing the Stars

by Kyra_Neko_Rei



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Foreknowledge, Fred Weasley Lives, Gen, Time travel fix-it fic, Voldemort won't know what hit him, everybody's trying to rewrite the timeline at once, except there's like eight of them, sorta - Freeform, that thing where you're a grown-up and then you wake up and you're eleven, the retroactive protection of your former self, this time around anyway, times a multitude, total chaos probably
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-09-29 19:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10142768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra_Neko_Rei/pseuds/Kyra_Neko_Rei
Summary: Adapted from a Tumblr prompt: instead of one adult, postwar character waking up at age eleven with full knowledge of what's to come and a determination to make it go better this time around, what if several of them did?Or: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Draco, Neville, Luna, Fred, and George each find themselves children again, fully aware of what's to come and plotting like mad to make it not happen--and each completely unaware that their classmates have found themselves in the same situation and are planning much the same thing.One person armed with foreknowledge can deftly reweave the timestream. Several people armed with foreknowledge are more likely to tangle it into spaghetti. And it doesn't help that maybe not everyone wants the same happy ending.





	1. Awakenings, Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this morning I read the second "some character who's survived the war wakes up in his eleven-year-old body and tries to change the timeline" ficlet I've encountered, and it occurred to me: what would it look like if all of them did?
> 
> What would it do to the timeline if Ron and Harry and Hermione and Neville and the others were each trying to thwart Voldemort and destroy the horcruxes all by themselves, and they kept stumbling over each other's efforts and having to deal with each other's effects?
> 
> So I started writing it, because I can't resist a good premise for chaos.

Ginny is, oddly enough, the first to wake up as a child again, the war and the deaths and her marriage undone and far off in the future, and it's exceptionally frustrating because she's _ten_ and Harry Potter is off in Little Whinging suffering at the hands of his relatives and nobody is about to let a ten-year-old girl (first girl born to the Weasley family in generations, treasured, coddled, treated by everyone like the youngest child she is) go haring off to save him.

Moreover, she's stuck at home for another year, again, _as a ten-year-old girl,_ and ohh, Merlin, that's going to suck.

On the other hand, she has Fred back, which more than makes up for it. Hell with that, she realizes that first morning: she has the _twins_ back, which is even better. She almost blows her cover right off the bat, shrieking at the sight of them and launching herself into their arms.

She's caught, and hugged, and asked questions of the “have you lost your mind?” variety, but since it's the twins it's full of the usual friendly mockery and she can treat it like the joke it is. She thinks fast and takes on a wheedling tone, calling them her _favorite_ brothers, and then begs them to sneak her into Hogwarts with them.

She's only half kidding.

It doesn't work, of course—they remind her that they all had to wait until they were eleven, and they promise to send her some Zonko's products and Honeydukes sweets and a Hogwarts toilet seat, and send her off, confused and distressed at the loss of things she hasn't gotten yet, husband and children and professional Quidditch contract and home and  _wand_.

She finds herself in the broom shed, looking over the collection of secondhand, battered broomsticks they've obtained over the years. A professional Quidditch player, she's used to riding a Firebolt, and her first instinct is contempt for these slow, plodding things, the Cleansweep Three that drags to the left a little, the ancient Shooting Star with its tendency to shudder if you accelerate too hard. Then she contemplates things a little further, and picks up the Shooting Star and begins to take it apart, her mind drifting back (forward?) to the class on broom design theory that Gwynog (dammit, Gwynog's a rising Quidditch star even now, and Ginny's a ten-year-old nobody, she doesn't have _any_ of her friends yet, and she has to choke back tears) insisted the whole team take.

There's only so much she can do without a wand, but the afternoon slides past her almost unaware, and she thinks she might have done something about that shudder when she has the thing reassembled around sunset. She's also come to the conclusion that Harry can handle his first year without her like he did the first time, and so she has a year to make plans.

In Diagon Alley, she gawks and stares as much as she did the first time around, but makes no pleas to go to Hogwarts, instead asking her mother in the bookstore if she could have a book on broomstick repair. “I want to know how they work, Mum,” she says, and her mother, bless her, believes it.

The answer is, “not today,” because Ron's school things are expensive, but Mum talks to Dad and Dad talks to someone at work and the next day Ginny has half a dozen secondhand books on broom anatomy and repair and the charms that go into them, lent or given by his coworkers at the Ministry. It's enough—enough to explain why she spends whole days in the broom shed, enough to explain why the Cleansweep Three's drag disappears and the Shooting Star gains an impressive new top speed and the Cleansweep Four will rise more than ten feet off the ground now, enough to excuse the thoughtful silences when she's plotting out how to find the Horcruxes she didn't get to join the hunt for and what she's going to say to Tom Riddle when she gets the chance, and there's a basilisk for her to slay herself this time instead of being the damsel in distress . . . she enlists her parents to perform the necessary charms, directing them on how and what and where, and watches an old Comet hover to life for the first time in three decades, and smiles.

  


-

  


Neville goes to sleep as the Herbology professor at Hogwarts and Head of Gryffindor House, and wakes up as a clumsy eleven-year-old to a croaking toad and his grandmother's calls.

Surprised, he surges out of bed expecting there to be more of him than there is, and lands on the floor tangled up in the bedsheets. He stares down at his hands, smaller and pudgier than they're supposed to be, and looks around at his childhood bedroom and at Trevor and at his reflection in the mirror. Old embarrassment threatens to swamp him—had he really looked like that? So diffident, so halting? He stands up in front of the mirror and tries to shift his posture into a more familiar position, and it's as alien to his eleven-year-old body as if he'd pretended to be a toad. Then Gran sticks her head in the doorway. “Come on, young man! We're going to be late!”

He nods—old habits come easily—and turns to look at his trunk. A far cry from gleaming and new; it was his father's, and it shows; it's packed for Hogwarts, and once Gran has left he goes and picks up the dozen or so things he remembers forgetting. Clothes, Hogwarts robes, and he practices standing straight. Malfoy is on this train, and Crabbe and Goyle and—his lips shape a swearword at the realization that Voldemort is alive and well again, that Neville has seven years of abuse from various sources to endure before he gets his life on track properly and . . . wait.

No. He doesn't. He's here in the past, and he has no idea why, but there's _nothing_ that says he has to go through it the exact same way he did last time around. He can refuse to take bullying from Malfoy, and he can do better in Potions to have less trouble from Snape, and he can . . . he can get rid of Voldemort so Harry doesn't have to, or at least get rid of those Horcruxes so Harry has less to deal with.

There's a moment's guilt at the prospect of stealing Harry's glory, and a moment's old envy of Harry's status and admiration telling him to go right ahead, but it's the thought of Harry with lines around his eyes at thirty, of more funerals than he can distinguish from one another, of hopeless and angry and suffering students in what Neville has since called the Year of Hell when he led Dumbledore's Army against Snape and the Carrows, of Fred and George laughing together the last time he heard them together, that has him standing up straight again.

This time it feels more natural.

  


-

  


Draco Malfoy wakes up feeling younger than he has in a long time, and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to notice that that's because he _is_ younger than he's been in a long time. It's so nice to burrow into plump comforters and soft pillows and luxuriate in the lack of tension in his shoulders and back, the absence of the ever-present dull throb at the base of his skull . . . this isn't his bed.

He sits up and stares for long minutes at Scorpius' room. Has he sleepwalked here? Drunk too much firewhiskey and passed out in his son's room? Dear Merlin, he hopes not. It would probably mean he has a drinking problem, and he doesn't need his life to be more of a failure than it is.

He stands up and reaches for his wand, momentarily panicking when it isn't there. Then he catches sight of himself in the mirror and _feels_ his brain grind to a halt.

The face he sees is the one he saw when he was eleven years old.

 _I've gone back in time_ , is his first thought.

 _How is that possible_ , is his second thought.

His third thought is _Oh, holy SHIT_ , because he's a Slytherin and a Malfoy and he knows _exactly_ what could be done with an opportunity like this, he can reshape the world, use his foreknowledge for personal gain like no ancestor of his has ever _dreamed_ , he can manipulate the hell out of _everything_ and it will be the most glorious thing ever.

He's beaming at himself in the mirror and luxuriating in the sense of godlike power when his fourth thought explodes in his head like five stunners going off at once.

 _What the fuck_ should _I do?_

He could betray Potter to the Dark Lord, but he's been under the Dark Lord's power and it turned out to be a living nightmare.

He could make sure he and his family were high in the Dark Lord's graces so as to prevent that from happening, but he's aware that even Bellatrix, the Dark Lord's clear favorite, was never immune from being turned on and carelessly gutted for the amusement of everyone else. He's aware that Professor Snape, whom the Dark Lord believed to be loyal, was discarded like a set of dirty robes when the Dark Lord saw more use in his death than his life. He's aware that the Dark Lord is—was—is mercurial, uncaring of anyone, uncaring even of purebloods, and to be honest, Draco doesn't want to spend his life groveling at the Dark Lord's feet like Bellatrix always did.

Potter saved him. Them. Everyone, really.

He owes Potter, and that rankles. Potter, who disdained his offer of friendship, who kept beating him at Quidditch, who was the Chosen One and the Triwizard Champion and famous and everything, swept in on a broom and hauled Draco out of a roomful of Fiendfyre like an errant school trunk, and acted like it was nothing.

That's what he'll change, Draco decides. Potter. He'll be Potter's friend this time around, or he'll make it so Potter will want to be his friend. He'll avoid insulting the Weasel, and—he looks around for his trunk, sees nothing, smiles at the certainty that his trip to Diagon Alley is yet to come—he'll care what Potter says and not talk down about Muggleborns just yet, and Potter will like him.

It isn't until the sun rises, and Draco has been sitting at his window for some hours plotting out what he'll change and how he'll go about it, that a third possibility occurs to him.

He could become the next Dark Lord himself.

  



	2. Awakenings, Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which three more people wake up in the past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to try for weekly updates, but I'm writing faster than that and am craving the feedback, so you get this early.
> 
> Again, to avoid confusion, yes, they're waking up on different days. Some of them have things to do before Hogwarts. Chronological order (or something like it, which might be the best one can hope for in a story about chronological chaos) will happen eventually .
> 
> To answer the question I raised last chapter, Snape is not going to be gifted with foresight here. I decided that having him among the unknowing reactees would be more interesting.

Luna realizes it right off—of course she does, for all that the world has always thought her batty for believing in snorkacks and nargles and Stubby Boardman, Luna is very, very good at seeing through the filter of what's _supposed_ to be possible and getting straight to the heart of what _is_.

Point in case: she's sitting in her childhood bedroom in her childhood self's body, so clearly she's gone back in time to her childhood self, and so the first thing she does is throw the covers off and sprint downstairs to her mother's workshop thinking, please, _please_ , let her be nine, let her be soon enough, let her mother be there alive and well and working on some wonderful experiment—

Luna slows to a dejected halt as the dusty, abandoned space appears ahead of her. The big worktable, the shelves, the clutter of supplies, even the scorched walls and ceiling where the explosion happened are all just as they were the day it happened, only quiet, so very quiet, when her mother was such a vivacious bundle of energy. Always singing, humming, whistling, talking to her dictoquill or to Luna, half a dozen things charmed into motion; the quiet is _wrong_ , and the universe is unfair in the extreme to bring Luna back in time but _not quite far enough_.

A pinch of pain in her right big toe brings Luna back to the here-and-now. She's wandered over to the little workshop her mother had set up for her; she'd been brewing something—a pepper-up potion, because she liked the way it made you smoke at the ears—when her mother's work had suddenly exploded and killed her. The brass cauldron is full of half-brewed sludge gone rock solid, and the vials are scattered and broken. Luna sets her foot on the tabletop and works the shard of glass out carefully.

Her father's footsteps sound their way down the stairs and Luna hurries out, not wanting to remind him. She's in the kitchen when he appears, and she fights back the urge to burst out sobbing at the sight of him, young and optimistic and not yet the defeated old man who had sold her friends out to try and protect her.

She forces a beaming smile and says, “Daddy, I'm going outside to see if there are plimpies in the river.”

He smiles back, face lighting up to match hers, and says, “Oh, yes, good girl. Remember to check for nargles in the dirigible plums on the way!”

She makes it to the bridge before she starts sobbing, and flings herself down among the pebbles by the edge of the water, burying her head in her sleeves and noting vaguely that she's still in her nightgown, which she guesses could pass for a muggle sundress.

She dips her feet in the water, watches the slow curl of blood carried away by the drifting current. She's too late to save her mother she doesn't have Rolf, she'll never know if she was going to be pregnant this month, and all her friends are in the future. She has her father, but she'll be going to Hogwarts soon.

She frowns thoughtfully. She doesn't know, she realizes, if she's ten or eleven, or even twelve. She can't remember a trunk in her room, but she probably wouldn't have noticed a crumple-horned snorkack today. She stands up abruptly, turns and runs for the garden.

There are fifteen fat blooms on her mother's Singing Rose, and the Downy Thornbush in the corner is still a seedling, almost unnoticeable next to the Non-Venomous Tentacula. That means it's the year after her mother died, and she's ten, and she won't go to Hogwarts until next year.

So why is she here now? A year too late  _and_ a year too early. Why?

She leans down to hear the roses. They sing quietly, each rose a different note, a different tone quality, depending on its age and size. Her mother had treasured this plant, loved to sit here and listen to it; it had been the only time she was ever quiet. Luna sits, and listens, and thinks of her.

When she goes in, her father is engrossed in in his copy of the Quibbler, which he reads on its delivery date “to get the full experience.” The secondary headline is “Boy-Who-Lived Starts Hogwarts Today, Might Be Secret Vampire?” and she realizes it must be September first.

A year exactly, then. A year until she goes to Hogwarts, almost six more until she finds real friends . . . unless she does something different this time? Yes, there's no reason why she needs to live the exact same experience all over again. She's an adult and has had over a decade of practice at this point, so she can make friends with Ron and Harry and Hermione and Neville and Ginny next year—wait.

Ginny isn't going to Hogwarts this year either. And the Burrow—she usually apparates, but the Burrow isn't far away? She consults with her mental map of the area, identifies the likely direction, and heads upstairs to change into a proper robe. “Daddy, I'm going to go exploring, okay?” she asks down the stairs.

“Okay, Luna, have fun.”

  
-

 

When Harry wakes to find himself staring at the undersides of the stairs in Number Four, Privet Drive, he dismisses it as a dream and goes back to sleep.

He determinedly ignores the thumping and shower of dust that is a hundred memories of Dudley jumping on the steps above him, and even the uncomfortable sharp raps of Aunt Petunia's knuckles on the door.

It's when the door bangs open and Uncle Vernon reaches in and drags him up that Harry realizes, one, he's clearly not dreaming, and two, he has a very big problem.

Vernon's blustering lecture goes past his ears only half-noticed; he's long since grown immune to that and, well, there are worse nightmares in his past. The real problem is, he doesn't belong here. He's in his thirties, a respected Auror, the man who defeated Voldemort . . . what in Merlin's name is he doing back in his aunt and uncle's house, his vision fuzzy, his stomach complaining of significant hunger?

Vernon bellows at him to get dressed, to do something about his hair, to go help his aunt with breakfast, and shoves Harry back into the closet.

Suddenly alone again, he makes himself focus. Option one, he's gone back in time. Option two, Hogwarts and magic and everything that's happened in the past twenty years has been a long, elaborate dream. He puts on broken glasses and stares at a baggy T-shirt, something Dudley had worn when they were five, and as though it were concrete evidence of how wrong everything is, he drops it on the floor and sits back down on the bed, shaking.

Aunt Petunia bangs on the door again, says something; he doesn't pay attention. _Think, Potter. You're a thirty-year-old Auror, you eat Dark Wizards for breakfast, you can handle this_.

Okay. Even if he's nothing more than an ordinary muggle, he's got a full set of adult memories and a sense of his own self-worth, and that's a far cry from nothing. If he's going to Hogwarts, if he's going to state school, either way, he's got a _huge_ advantage and he can use it.

Breathe. Calm down. Get through this, find more information.

One step at a time.

He picks up the shirt.

  
-

 

Hermione Jean Granger-Weasley stares at the wall of her childhood bedroom for a really long time because the world has stopped making sense in a very big way, and she's never been all that good with such things.

Really, she should be quicker. She handled it when Hugo turned the toilet inside out; she handled that one Arithmancy text from the Department of Mysteries; she's lived with Ron for years now, and with magic longer than that.

She still gets stuck on “this is impossible” five times in the course of discovering that she's eleven again, a few days out from going to Hogwarts for the first time.

When the impossible whole of it finally coalesces inside her brain, she looks her eleven-year-old self in the mirror and says, “Shit.”

Then gasps and covers her mouth like the child she is, looking frantically to the door in worry that her parents might hear.

This is bad.

She's time traveled before. She had the Time-Turner in her third year, and she's read all the guidelines about time travel, including the part where there's a hard limit of twenty-four hours back and the complete absence of anything indicating a regression in aging, not that it would be at all apparent. Most importantly, she remembers the absolute prohibition on changing the past. You could only create it, and once anything was witnessed it was effectively set in stone, and the consequences for changing it, being discovered, meddling with the way of things, were to dire to even be spoken of.

Her being here now is impossible, and that isn't even the biggest problem.

How, how on Earth, how in Merlin's name, is she ever going to get through twenty years without accidentally causing a single alteration to the timeline?

Hermione Jean Granger buries her head in her hands and tries hard not to cry, and cries anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Six down, three to go, and then we can get to the interesting shenanigans. I hope everybody's enjoying this; I sure am.
> 
> Keep telling me what you think!


	3. Awakenings, Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did the time thing again, sorry. The second half of the chapter takes place a few hours before the first. Next chapter should start behaving in a reasonable chronological order.

Ron has gone crazy.

That's the only thought in his head as he sits up in bed at the Burrow, looking around at his childhood room, down at his small hands, across at his too-young face in the tarnished, skew-hung mirror.

He's thirty. He's got kids. He's married. He hasn't lived here, outside of the occasional Christmas visit, for years. He hasn't _been this small_ in years.

He pinches himself, and winces when nothing happens.

Outside his bedroom is _noise_ , the normal clatter of a large household waking up, and it's _jarring_ how familiar it is.

Okay. He's never had a dream like this—maybe George snuck him a new daydream charm? A memory-based one, somehow? That'd be impressive. Or maybe this is just a really weird dream—got to be a first time sometime, hasn't it? Or maybe he's had dozens of dreams like this and forgot them every time. That'd explain things.

What doesn't explain things is time travel, because he's listened to Hermione expound on the topic several times. If he's honest he still isn't quite over her getting a time-turner in third year and not sharing it with them.

Them.

He hasn't thought of himself, Hermione, and Harry as _them_ in some time now. It's either him and Hermione, or him and Hermione and Harry and Ginny.

And the kids, usually.

It's not that he dislikes his sister, or minds her addition to the group, but it has changed the dynamic a bit.

His musings are interrupted by Mum banging on the door. “Ron! Get up! We don't want to miss the train!

Ron freezes. Really? He's not only somehow _in the past_ , but it's _that day_? Hogwarts day? He gets to relive his first day of school, his meeting with Hermione and Harry?

He wonders if he's died.

_Gee, I hope not_.

He gets up, though. Dream or no dream, there's no point in spending it sitting in bed getting yelled at by his mother.

The robes in the closet are hand-me-downs from Percy and from the twins; he chooses one of Percy's because Fred and George are the wrong shape and it shows . . . his eyes widen and he runs out into the hall in his pyjamas, staring at Fred and George.

Both of them.

Together.

Alive.

“Uhh, Ronniekins?”

“You going to Hogwarts dressed like that?”

“You'll start a new fashion, you will.”

“Stripey bloke.”

Ron stares at the pair of them.

He _can't tell them apart_.

He grins at them and rushes back into his own room to get dressed.

This is going to be the best day.

  


-

  


Fred wakes up.

This surprises him, because, y'know, death and all that. He'd seen the green flash coming, had a split second to know what it was, and then nothing.

He isn't entirely sure when that was. Could be a moment ago, could be eternity.

What he's doing in his room at the Burrow with what appears to be a thirteen-year-old George next to him, he has no idea.

He does, however, know what to do: lick his finger and place it behind George's ear.

George sort of shudders awake with a satisfying squeal. “What the f—Fred?”

Fred grins. “Who else?”

He's prepared to be tackled, but not to be hugged so tight his ribs creak.

“Uh, George?”

George looks down at him, his face _so many emotions_ that Fred knows his twin had watched him die. His voice is shaky, a thoroughly disbelieving happiness. “Who else?”

Fred thinks for a long moment.

“Did we win?”

George looks evenly over at his twin, and nods. “We won. You-know-who tried to kill Harry with Harry's wand and it blew up in his face, Mom killed Bellatrix, the house-elves swarmed and attacked the Death Eaters with ladles and cleavers, and it turns out Snape was on our side the whole time.” He's still processing that last part; him and Snape were . . . complicated.

Fred raises both eyebrows. “I can't tell if you're having me on, mate.”

They take the mickey out of each other as much as everyone else, figuring any practice is good practice, but George shakes his head. “Nope. Completely serious. Turns out he had a longtime crush on Harry's mom, and betrayed Ol' Snakeface's plans to Dumbledore when he started hunting for the Potters.”

“And your ear?” Fred is less inclined to forgive that part.

“Aiming for some Death Eater. Missed.”

“Really? _Snape_ missed?”

George grins at him, _exactly_ like a teenage boy who's discovered a crack in a teacher's formidable reputation. “Yep!”

“We're never letting him hear the end of this, are we?” He's surprised when his brother's grin vanishes.

“He's dead,” says George.

“So am I,” points out Fred.

“Are you, though?” George asks. “We're kinda . . .” he waves at the bodies they're currently inhabiting.

“Small?” Fred suggests.

George thinks that one through. “Did we go back in time somehow?”

“What's the last thing you remember?”

“Going to bed,” says George. “At nine in the morning. With the biggest party Hogwarts has ever seen going on around my private little circle of Hell.”

Fred sobers. “My condolences, bro.”

George laughs at that, because it was like fifteen minutes ago that Fred was _gone,_ life was broken, how dare anyone laugh and cheer and sing, and now his twin is not only back but offering him condolences on his own death.

He stops laughing because something else is beginning to occur to him, around the sunbright incandescent joy of his brother's return. “Fred . . .”

“George?”

“We seem to have gone back in time.”

“Yup.”

“With foreknowledge.”

“Yup.” Fred's grin is getting bigger and bigger, like the time they hatched Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, or got Umbridge with the failed Skiving Snackboxes that gave you boils. “And adult intelligence and experience, don't forget that.”

“We're gonna exploit the hell out of this, aren't we?”

“ _Hell_ , yes.”


	4. Miss Me, Muggles?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this took me long enough. Finally figured out what it was missing and got it written. Enjoy.

When Vernon tells Harry to get the mail the first thought through Harry's head is _don't bring your Hogwarts letter back to the table like an idiot_.

His second thought is _I don't know, that turned out pretty cool._

He's contemplating the ethics of getting Dudley stuck with a pig's tail for most of a month when Dudley takes the decision out of his hands, literally, coming up behind him and snatching the whole mess of letters from him, and knocking him to the floor besides. Right. This Dudley isn't the more matured, settled, adult Dudley with whom Harry has a decently peaceful relationship, and either Harry's paused too long in considering or the timeline has some sort of self-righting feature to it.

He makes a mental note to share this theory with Hermione if he gets the chance.

Right now, though, Dudley is headed back for the kitchen and Harry follows.

  


The sight of the Hogwarts letter addressed to Mr. H. Potter is a relief that makes Harry's knees grow weak. It makes Dudley's eyes widen and Aunt Petunia blanch white and Uncle Vernon's face turn red, and Harry makes a grab for it and is shoved away for his efforts. Vernon sneers at him. “Who'd be writing to _you?”_

Harry smiles brightly and suggests, “Wizards?” as if he's being deliberately ridiculous, and ohh, it's satisfying to see Vernon's face darken to purple.

“ _There's no such thing as wizards!_ ” Uncle Vernon bellows, tearing the letter to pieces. “This—is—trash!” and he punctuates it by flinging the pieces into the bin.

Well, Harry supposes, that's that.

He protests, more to annoy Vernon than anything else, “Hey, that's mine.”

“You're trash,” says Dudley, and shoves him toward the bin, hard enough to make him stumble. Right, this Dudley outmasses him by rather more than he will when they're adults.

Vernon laughs, but grabs Harry away from the bin. “Get out of here!”

-

Thus reassured that he still has his magic, Harry decides to try using it, wandlessly tipping the frying pan out of Aunt Petunia's hand the next morning and summoning all the sausages to him under the table while she dashes to grab a towel. Thus fed for the day, he watches his relatives' consternation over where the hell the sausages went with amusement, and waits for the next batch of Hogwarts letters to show up.

The week passes much the same as it did the first time around, except that Harry, freshly dismayed at their treatment of a child in their care from his perspective as an adult and a parent, plays several more magical tricks on them: adjusting Vernon's ties into a number of blatantly wrong knots before he leaves for work in the mornings, making weeds erupt and go to seed in the front yard, levitating things to and fro when anyone puts something down for a second, altering the trajectory of owl shit on five different occasions. He even indulges in the distinctly nonmagical trick of pissing on Uncle Vernon's car one evening; the next morning Vernon comes back in steaming and telling Petunia they have a problem with stray dogs in the neighborhood, before washing it off himself with a bucket. Then one of the owl-shit opportunities presents itself, and that day Vernon goes to work with a beautiful splotch of white marring the upper back of his suit and transferred to the backrest of his seat in the car as well.

Harry's never actually had a chance to mess with the Dursleys as a fully magic-capable Hogwarts student, but now, before he's ever been to Hogwarts, the prohibition is not yet present and he can have fun with the situation.

The owls are a lot more fun too, now that he isn't worried about who's trying to contact him and distressed that the Dursleys might keep them away from him forever. He doesn't manage to feed them—Aunt Petunia doesn't let him out—but watching them is a joy that he hasn't truly felt since Hedwig's death. Between them and the bevy of magical tricks he for once has access to, it's easily the best week he's ever spent with his relatives.

When Vernon finally orders them all into the car and starts driving like a man possessed, Harry can sit back, worry-free, and enjoy the cracks in his uncle's sanity and Dudley's distress at a day without food or telly. When they arrive at what Harry now knows to be Cokeworth he looks around with interest, aware that his mother grew up here and Professor Snape might be somewhere in town right now. Him and Aunt Petunia would make for an interesting conversation, should Harry decide to bolt in the appropriate direction . . .

Unfortunately, he isn't sure of the address or of Snape's presence, and Vernon eventually comes back with the gun and drives them off again.

The boat ride is interesting, but cold; the shack is miserable and gloomy, and Harry is unaccustomed to hunger to the point that the past week is really getting to him. It's an astonishing relief when Hagrid shows up, and Harry sits back and watches the ensuing confrontation with even more amusement the second time around. Vernon is a hilarious combination of bluster and fear, dread and fury, but all of his anger is so much hot air compared to Hagrid's, who raises his pink umbrella and _growls_ the words, “ _Never insult Albus Dumbledore in front of me_.”

Truth to tell, it's more of a roar, but Harry hears the anger in it this time, the real, bone-deep fury built up by all Dumbledore was and is to Hagrid, and has a new appreciation for how much effort it took Hagrid to refrain from ripping Uncle Vernon limb from limb. Magically or not.

Dudley's new pig tail is almost anticlimactic in comparison.

That said, he _is_ a grownup and a parent, or has been, and bully or no, Dudley is eleven, so Harry sneaks over to Dudley while Vernon and Petunia are having a frantic whispered argument. No words; he just puts a hand on Dudley's shoulder—Dudley freezes—and undoes the transfiguration, snapping his fingers for good measure.

Dudley's eyes go wide and he stares at Harry as though he has no possible way to make sense of this. He probably doesn't, but . . . well. Harry's done what he can, for now.

Well, not quite. He slips back out into the other room, and back in again, offering Dudley a messy handful of chocolate cake.

Dudley's eleven, and hasn't eaten all day. He crams it in his mouth, watching Harry like a mouse might watch an owl. Somehow, Vernon and Petunia manage to not notice, still hissing to each other like they're trying to talk without moving their lips.

Harry falls asleep in Hagrid's giant furry overcoat, feeling relaxed and relieved for the first time in a week.

-

Draco is surprised at the extent to which being eleven again is a comfort to him.

Mother and Father are younger, happier, their lives unclouded by the unpleasant reality of the Dark Lord's presence. He, Draco, has no responsibilities, no secret missions, no past scandals weighing down his reputation. Father is on the Hogwarts Board of Governors, and Draco has resolved to rearrange things so Father keeps that position, though he isn't quite sure how.

It's easy and wonderful to settle into enjoying his parents' attention and the lack of any worry stronger than what robes to wear to Diagon Alley.

Unfortunately, he _is_ going to Diagon Alley and that means he has to figure out how to handle Harry Potter.

He changes robes, studies himself in the mirror, changes them again. Reminds himself that Potter has always been as dense as a troll about these things and so any attempts at visual charisma are likely to go completely unnoticed.

He's on his eighth set of robes anyway by the time his mother calls from the doorway. “Draco, darling, it's time to go.”

“Yes, Mother,” he says, and heads to meet his uncertain future.

-

Morning brings the owl with the Daily Prophet, and sausages, and a boat ride and a motorcycle ride and a subway ride.

It also, he doesn't even _remember_ until it _happens_ , involves him shaking hands with Voldemort.

Well, with Voldemort's host, Professor Quirrell, technically, but Harry's heart skips _hard_ at his first sight of the man and then Quirrell is up and stammering and shaking Harry's hand and Harry is trying with everything he has in him not to stare at the lavender turban hiding his mortal enemy's face on the back of Quirrell's head.

Then it's over, and Hagrid is saying something, and Harry isn't listening; he _is_ staring at the turban now, with Quirrell's back turned, Voldemort behind the fabric doubtless staring right at Harry, and Harry wonders what the effects would be if he were to magically yank the turban right off and expose the both of them for what they were in front of the entire crowd of the Leaky Cauldron.

The Auror in him considers the possible death toll, and nixes the idea. Then Hagrid is gently tugging him out the back, and tapping his umbrella against the wall, and the wizarding world is opening before him, for the first time, again.

-

In Diagon Alley, Draco finds himself panicking over the timing.

During the course of breakfast and changing his robes eight times and probably getting up at a different time since he woke up in the middle of the night, he has no idea what time he was “supposed” to run into Harry Potter in the robe shop.

This could pose a problem.

His mother fusses over how distracted he is, how careless he's being of which things he selects, and even how he hasn't bothered anybody for a broom all day. It's too much on his already-stressed nerves, so before he does something stupid like throw a tantrum and get brought home, he says, “Honestly, Mother, that wasn't very subtle at all.”

“Draco?” she asks, all puzzlement. “What do you mean, darling?”

“Well, if you thought I was acting strangely for some reason”—he has, no doubt about it—“then it would make more sense to act like you hadn't noticed, and gather more information without alerting me to your suspicions.”

His mother laughs, because both she and Father have been teaching him this sort of thing all his life. “True, Draco, you've caught me, but I've caught you as well. Care to tell me why you've been acting a bit differently today?”

Draco shrugs as if it's nothing. “I woke up early this morning and was replaying that last conversation with Father, and it occurred to me that I sounded something of a brat. So I decided to try and pretend as if I were a grownup today.” _And you'd be proud of me_ goes unsaid, as well as _and I might get the broom_.

His mother's smile lights up the world, and Draco catches his breath. He hasn't seen her smile like this, purely joyful, without a care in the world, since before the Dark Lord came back and turned their security to ashes.

“That's wonderful. I'm so proud of you, Draco!” She hugs him.

The old, young eleven-year-old Draco would have squirmed out, claiming embarrassment. The new, old eleven-year-old Draco hugs her back, fully aware of how precious such a moment is.

And its then when, his head turned to the side and pressed against her, he sees Harry Potter being led through the entrance to Diagon Alley by the half-giant, Hagrid.

Right. Time to make the future happen.


End file.
